Terror Toons

While their parents are away, blonde teen sisters Cindy (Beverly Lynn) and Candy (Lizzie Borden) will play. Cindy invites a female friend and two guys over for pizza, wine coolers and a game of 'strip Ouija board.' The more childish Candy pops in a 'Terror Toons' DVD (which she received anonymously in the mail…from hell!) and ends up unleashing two of the maniacal lead characters (Dr. Carnage and Max Assassin). The deadly duo then proceeds to kill everyone off in gory, cartoonish ways.

There are a lot of mediocre gore FX (spine ripped out of back, brain surgery, body sawed in half…), mediocre to bad performances and some fun/silly touches (including scenes from the DVD and another set in hell). It's cheesy alright (and the ending is just terrible), but considering the fact it was done on a budget of '2300' dollars and was filmed in 3 days, it's a little more imaginative, colorful and ambitious than you might expect, suggesting the director may do good work with a higher budget.

The Full Moon video release (which received a rather wide circulation at Blockbuster) has cast and crew interviews, outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage at the end.

I just watched Terror Toons, and here's my review of it. The plot is nothing special, of course. In this kind of movie, it's the execution of that plot that makes it worthwhile. So is it worthwhile? Some yes, some no.

The bad stuff: the acting, dialog, and the human characters. None of them are very memorable except for the main characters' mother, who is played by a drag queen[!] and who in one scene complains about her husband getting drunk at a wedding and moonwalking into the cake. That got a small chuckle out of me. Every other person is just dull; played by horrible-to-barely-mediocre actors spouting clumsy, cliched slasher-flick dialog.

The good: the villains, the gore/special effects, and the production design. This is one of the better looking, more ambitious direct-to-video horror quickies I've seen. Dr. Carnage and his monster-monkey assistant Max are appropriately freaky, if not actually scary, and they take great pleasure in creatively carving up the cast of disposable characters with exagerrated cartoon weapons; think Itchy and Scratchy, but live-action. The music/soundtrack accentuates this. It's very inspired by Beetlejuice and goofy sound effects are used as a jarring accompanyment to the murders. The sets are very skewed and funhouse-like, with bright colors and weird props; effective use of lighting creates a scary-funhouse kind of atmosphere.

The bottom line: you've got to see this movie once to experience it, but repeated viewings are not essential, in my opinion. It's an acceptable drive-in-style slasher flick with some minor innovations, nothing more.

Obviously this movie is for people with good, dark senses of humor and I think most of the people who say that this movie is bad is because they're either artsy college kids who look at movies seriously(you know, the kids that think that foreign films are genius, just because they're in foreign.) or they have no humor about what you can do in a movie(these are more the kind of people who make fun of things that they don't get so that they don't look stupid.) But, if you like GWAR shows and Troma films, than this movie is for you.

Terror Toons, starring porn icon Lizzie Borden and Beverly Lynne, has a bad porn feel to it, only without the titillating sex and nudity. And cohesive plot.

Candy and Cindy are sisters left home for the night when their dad and "mom" leave for a wedding. Cindy receives a DVD called Terror Toons, which unleashes supposed cartoon characters Dr. Carnage and Max Assassin.

I'll give Beverly Lynne and Kelly Liu credit, they at least try to do a halfway decent job, but they are let down by their director and the special effects department. Joe Castro doesn't so much film as he just happens to keep a camera in the room as his story unfolds. The special effects would be laughable if they weren't so nauseating...not nauseating in the sense of "ooh, brains" but in the sense of "ooh, special effects goop."

It took one person to come up with the story, and three to come up with the script. What exactly took three people? The tired cartoon characters running through doors in a hallway? The cop who likes donuts? Strip Ouija?

This is a horrible, hateful little movie that will make you wonder about humanity's capacity to come together and put together something so unbelievably awfully. Stay away from it.

I seem to have had the exact opposite reaction to the movie. I knew that I wasn't renting "Schindler's List" when I picked it up, and the movie didn't disappoint. While there are plenty of rough edges to the movie, it was inventive enough for me to keep my hands off the scan button and watch it. People looking for a little no-brainer diversion might want to check it out.